TL;DR: To get rid of our awfully long name, we’ve decided from now on to use a short acronym, 16bap, which is shorter, easier to pronounce and remember, and more cool.
In order to reflect this change, we’ve changed all our addresses and tags on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube; scroll to the end of this wall of text to find the updated URLs and update your bookmarks accordingly.
When I created the project I immediately found myself with one big problem: what name should I give to it?
So I started thinking about something which would capture well the spirit of my work: it’s about high quality audio rips, so… High Quality Videogame Music? HQ VGM? Mmm… that HQ may be misunderstood with HeadQuarters or something else.
Also, VGM is already a file format, .vgm, and it’s not what this project is really about.
I needed to find something which would unmistakably tell the public that we’re all about maximum audio quality… Audiophile.
This is the word around which I played and, boy, did I regret that!
It looks like the “audiophile” (and audiophiles in general) word is always used in a negative fashion and audiophiles are regarded as weirdos dumping huge amount of money to get the most esoteric equipment in the world in their audio setup.
This is, of course, far from reality and generally referred to a small niche; it’s just a stupid prejudice which needs to go away.
Still, if I could go back, I’d try to find something more… simple. It seems like people have issues pronouncing it too!
I mean, I’m not a native english speaker and have no issues with it, but still…
Anyway, once I found the word which would describe that our work is top notch audio stuff, I had to get videogames in it.
At the time I really wanted to do high quality rips of the Sonic games on the Mega Drive/Genesis, so I thought about it for a while and then came up with “16-bit”, which would leave open also other 16-bit consoles like SNES/Super Famicom.
The 16-bit Audiophile… something.
What the hell is this? How do I name it? The word “project” instantly came to my mind and I just jammed it in and read it aloud several times: The 16-bit Audiophile Project.
I must say, to this day, it still sounds incredibly cool to me, but a lot of people have pointed out how technical, complicated and silly this name is.
We’ve been running strong for more than 2 years now and people know us as The 16-bit Audiophile Project which is indeed an awfully long name to say, but changing our name now would mean to confuse all our followers and maybe even lose some of them.
So I decided to fix this by using a short acronym which is easy to remember and pronounce: 16bap.
This way, whenever we talk about our project, we can just say “16bap” instead of “The 16-bit Audiophile Project” which is way shorter and more friendly, especially when speaking. (to check the correct pronunciation, click here and click on the speaker)
To reflect this change, we had to update ALL our addresses, which meant that, unfortunately, we had to make a new Facebook Page because it’s not possible to change the address of a Page once it’s set.
On top of those, we decided to start rocking our own hashtag too: #16bap !
You’re encouraged to use this whenever you talk about our project on social network and start the trend and spread the word!
You’ll find the updated links below.
Please notice that some links will still be outdated. Report them to us so we’ll fix them asap.
Thanks for your understanding and continued support!
Let’s go #16bap!
Website: https://16bap.theclassicgamer.net
Facebook: https://facebook.com/16bap
Twitter: https://twitter.com/16bap (@16bap)
Youtube: https://youtube.com/16bap
